GRAYSON CAPPS: DRINK A LITTLE POISON
By Team JamBase Mar 23, 2007 • 12:00 am PDT
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His characters are the overlooked, the taken-for-granted, the sandwich makers and washers of laundry. Capps says they’re “the invisible people that Carson McCullers talks about in The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. I think it’s a theme that was really heavy in my father’s life that transferred to me through music. People get so concerned about these big dangling carrots that they forget about the clover under their feet.”
When The Levee Breaks
Capps sophomore effort, Wail & Ride, sounds like what Little Feat‘s troubled genius Lowell George might have gotten around to if he’d lived long enough. Wail hums with quiet wisdom and unforced momentum. It grows with you over time, different facets touching a nerve depending on your own levels of sorrow and joy. Inspired by his longtime residence in New Orleans and subsequent exodus after Hurricane Katrina, Wail is a country-rock evensong that helps us reach the dawn.
“I went to Tulane University and I stayed in New Orleans after graduation. I was there for a little more than half my life. It’s the only town in America I ever wanted to live in,” laments Capps. “It’s a little over-the-top right now. If I didn’t have kids I’d probably be there still. It’s [got] a twisted post-war vibe.” At the suggestion that parts of city have gone feral, he snaps, “It was already like that, it’s just one toke over the line now [laughs]. There’s been some crazy murders, some crazy suicides. You can actually watch the earth eat the cemeteries.”
There are hips to his writing, a joyous, open sensuality befitting a son of the Crescent City. Nowhere is this vibe more clear than “Give It To Me,” a two-minute slap ‘n’ tickle sure to put a lil’ lead in your pencil.
You got your devil in your dragon’s eye
You got a black girl in your ass
I like the way you drink
Your wine from a coffee glass
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That voice is able to sell humdingers like “You’ve got the magic of a mermaid” or “Cry me one tear so I’ll know that I made you feel good,” and the tunes skip along like a pair of moonshine polished lovers. “I’m fascinated with children’s melodies,” remarks Capps. “Dr. John said, ‘Every song is Frankie And Johnny.’ There’s a lot of truth to that. You can write bad melodies or you can go to the great melodies already written and use them as themes. I’m a great fan of Woody Guthrie and that guy was a big thief of melody. I don’t purposely steal melody. I just like the simplicity of melody.”
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Interlude 1: Calling
Grayson Capps: Everything I’ve recorded so far has been autobiographical.
JamBase: It’s funny how different it feels inside when you hit upon your vocation, the thing you’re supposed to be doing. There’s plenty of things you do for a paycheck or you do to please other people but when you hit upon your thing it’s weird how the light goes on.
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There is an element of faith in embarking on your calling.
If people really trusted God – whatever you want to define God as – they’d be naked like animals. Animals trust God. They don’t hoard. They don’t fear that they’re gonna lose something. They trust Mother Nature, which I guess is my definition of God.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe things could be different than they are. We have a hard time shaking ourselves out of the moment.
Especially when things are bad.
We usually find our calling when things suck. We find it down there in the mud.
I started writing music because I wasn’t hearing what I wanted to hear. There were certain people along the way that inspired me like Nick Cave. I thought, ‘That son of a bitch, he’s doing exactly what I’m feeling!’ Then I discovered Tom Waits and thought, ‘Shit, that’s the other thing I was feeling!’ Then there’s some kind of end [to these inspirations]. Nick Cave, I love him but he gets too fruity sometimes. And Tom Waits is just Tom Waits World a little too much. You can’t imitate it and you don’t want to.
Bobby Long
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“It’s one of the few movies that captures the vibe of New Orleans, that Big Easy accent shit and people laying all over the place being lethargic from the heat. The beauty of it was they actually filmed in August when it was hot as shit. It captures some of the sweat that Marlon Brando had in A Streetcar Named Desire,” remarks Capps.
However, there was a lot they got wrong. Capps says, “I remember seeing the four-hour version of it and loved it. What they whittled it down to broke my heart. I guess it was typical but the fellas with the money, at every turn, they just ruined it. They didn’t understand why there wasn’t a car chase. I’m serious. The whole romance was a Hollywood decision. In my father’s book, Lorraine was a fat woman who ate Cheetos and had to be taken to a hospital in the trunk of a car. That’s the real truth. She wasn’t like a jazz singer. When she died, her daughter was a little pimply-faced thing from North Florida who Bobby and Fred just wanted to fuck. They did everything they could, and the only reason they kept her there was to try and get into her pants. The only bait they had was their intelligence.”
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“When I graduated college, we had a place with a $150 per month rent. Our one-legged landlord lost the place to bankruptcy. These different banks would send us notices saying we owed rent, which was still only $150. We had shotgun houses next to each other. We decided, ‘Fuck, nobody knows who owns this place so we’re gonna stop paying rent!’ We didn’t pay rent for two years. I had gas running to my place illegally. Then my neighbor, White John, had water running to his place. And my other neighbor, Black John, had electricity. We’d run extension cords to all the houses. It was a comedy. I was playing on the streets and whatever money we made we’d use to buy alcohol and food. That was my existence for years. It was wonderful but it’s also where the line ‘It’s a rotten paradise. Sometimes I think I’m gonna die,’ comes from. It was so on the edge. If you got some weird fungus under your arm you couldn’t go to the doctor to fix it. It’s exciting and scary at the same time.”
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Interlude 2: Kids
Grayson Capps: I have two really young children. For me, it’s the most wonderful and horrible thing to happen in my whole life.
JamBase: My wife and I just had our first child a few months ago.
Capps: It’ll seem like hell at first but there’s a full circle. You start losing the narcissistic part of yourself. It was a great realization to me that I needed to get my head out of my ass [laughs].
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I notice at shows I’ll have 18-year olds all the way up to 60-year olds. They’ll write me and say their four and five year olds love my CDs. A little girl in Pennsylvania got her parents to drive hours to see me and she’s about five years old! She was singing “Poison” [a rollicking, juke joint rumbler on Wail & Ride].
It’s strange but if you don’t dumb it down children are capable of absorbing more sophisticated music than the stuff officially intended for them.
It’s amazing to listen to the stuff actually intended as children’s music. There’s this one lady who has a big couch and she acts like a young kid and she just fails miserably. Then there’s this Australian group called The Wiggles who sing things like, ‘Fruit salad, yummy yummy.’ That one gets the kids dancing. Then there’s Taj Mahal and Doc Watson and the kids really love that.
I’ve noticed at festivals kids absolutely love bluegrass. And bluegrass pickers, who are already more interested in interacting with the crowd, really delight in kids’ reactions. If a little boy dances in front of the stage they’ll lean down and fiddle in his face.
My daughter loves bluegrass. My two-year old son has Elmore James in his [music] box and plays him a lot. One of his first words was “Elmo James.” He loves that [scats a scratchy diddly-diddly-diddly slide guitar riff]. We just gotta make sure we give them the good stuff.
The Highway Kind
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“I go out with the band a lot, especially since Hurricane Katrina. Everybody had gigs in New Orleans and we spent seven or eight months in a van trying to support everybody. A friend said, ‘Whoever you were sleeping with on August 28 you’re married to now.’ That’s the case with my band [laughs]. It’s more true to the recordings and it’s very much the energy that I love. We’ll go from a cappella acoustic to full-fledged Hound Dog Taylor fuck up. We run from Tom T. Hall to AC/DC in our mentality.”
Out amongst the people is where a hirsute troubadour like Grayson Capps belongs. His well-spun tales of the rough and sweet sides of life are subtly inspirational.
“One thing I heard my father say a long time ago was, ‘If you cannot provide hope by the end of your work then you should not be an artist.’ That’s been one of the biggest things that’s stuck with me,” muses Capps. “I go into weird spots and come out of it providing hope. Sometimes I seem gloomy but there’s always an out.”
JamBase | California
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